A giant Tiffany window is the latest treasure acquired by the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Ark., the deep-pocketed institution founded by Walmart heiress and philanthropist Alice Walton.

The monumental stained-glass masterpiece, created by Tiffany Studios in 1917, is titled Mountain Landscape (Root Memorial Window). Measuring 110 by 93 inches—over nine feet tall and almost eight feet wide—it comes to the museum from the Sunset Ridge Church and Collective in San Antonio, where it has been installed for 94 years.

“It has an impact and this immersive quality, and will be illuminated from the back,” Jen Padgett, the museum’s curator of craft, told me. “We’re going to have it on view with landscape paintings by artists like Thomas Cole [1801–1848]. To think about landscape with a very different medium and format will have this really lively dynamic.”

The window depicts a cascading waterfall, with mountains in the distance, behind towering trees with lush foliage.

Tiffany Studios, designed by Agnes Northrup, Mountain Landscape (Root Memorial Window), 1917. Installation view: Sunset Ridge Church of Christ, San Antonio, Texas. Photo: by Ansen Seale.

“This really wooded area feels like it was made for the museum,” Padgett added. “Set in this space where we’re surrounded by the Ozark woods, it has such a striking similarity to scenes that people might see here when they go hiking in these rural areas in northwest Arkansas.”

This is only the second work in the Crystal Bridges collection from the decorative arts company founded by Louis Comfort Tiffany (1848–1933), son of Charles Lewis Tiffany (1812–1902) of the jewelry company Tiffany & Co. The younger Tiffany ran his company from 1878 until 1930, and became well known for his work in glass, including mosaics, vases, and stained glass windows and lamps.

In 2022, the Benedict Silverman Collection donated one of Tiffany’s famous wisteria lamps to Crystal Bridges. It’s one of the designs now credited to Clara Driscoll (1861–1944), the manager of the so-called “Tiffany girls” who made up the company’s Women’s Glass Cutting Department in the studio in Corona, Queens.

While Driscoll specialized in lampshades, also creating the beloved Tiffany dragonfly lamp, many of the stained glass windows were the work of Agnes Northrup (1857–1953).

Tiffany Studios, designed by Agnes Northrup, Mountain Landscape (Root Memorial Window), 1917. Installation view: Sunset Ridge Church of Christ, San Antonio, Texas. Photo: by Ansen Seale.

“Agnes Northrup was a prominent designer within Tiffany Studios and was responsible for the major landscape windows during this period. She specialized in beautiful scenes of nature,” Padgett said.
”The composition and subject of this window are very similar to a really monumental one [the Hartwell Memorial Window] at the Art Institute of Chicago, as well as a window that’s at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art,
Autumn Landscape.”

Like those well-known examples, the Root Memorial Window is a beautiful piece, with Tiffany’s signature mottled colors in rich shades of blue, green, and red glass.

“Tiffany’s innovation was these really experimental glass fabrication techniques,” Padgett added. “When a window was being assembled, having not just one pane where you would see the scene, but layering the panes so that you might have three or four or five or six panes of glass so that you have those multiple layers.”

At Crystal Bridges, the window will be among the new stars of the collection next year, when the museum unveils its current expansion project, first announced in 2021. The institution, which will turn 15 in 2026, is adding 114,000 square feet to its facilities—meaning 50 percent more space—in a project designed by Safdie Architects.

Tiffany Studios, designed by Agnes Northrup, Mountain Landscape (Root Memorial Window), 1917. Installation view: Sunset Ridge Church of Christ, San Antonio, Texas. Photo: by Ansen Seale.

The galleries will be completely reinstalled on a rotating basis ahead of the opening, allowing the museum to remain open to visitors throughout the process.

The new displays will highlight acquisitions like the Root Memorial Window as well as “the ways that the collection has grown, especially expanding around the areas of craft and Indigenous art,” Padgett said. “It’ll be everything that people love about Crystal
Bridges and even more.”

The museum declined to share details of the work’s purchase price, but a slightly larger piece, the Danner Memorial Window, designed by Northrup for the First Baptist Church in Canton, Ohio, in 1913, set a Tiffany Studios auction record of $12.4 million in November at Sotheby’s New York, according to the Artnet Price Database. (Another Tiffany window, although not from Northrup, is expected to fetch up to $3 million at Christie’s New York next month.)

The potential value of the Root Memorial Window was something of a double-edged sword for Sunset Ridge Church. It couldn’t afford to insure the art-historical treasure, which was originally commissioned by the Woodmen of the World, a fraternal organization in Omaha, as a memorial to founder Joseph Cullen Root. Out of concern for potential damage to the work, the church had actually closed the window off from visitors over a decade ago.

“We were approached by the church because they had been thinking about the future of the window,” Padgett said. “Other individuals, private collectors and dealers, had made offers around purchasing the window from them, but they really wanted to find a future home where the window would reach a large public audience.”

Tiffany Studios, Arkansas State Window, 1931. Installation view: Sunset Ridge Church of Christ, San Antonio. Photo: by Ansen Seale.

The first order of business upon receipt of the window is to subject it to “a very thorough and meticulous cleaning—it had been installed in a site where it was exposed to the elements.” Padgett said. “We’re excited about those next steps, in the conservation of the window, which is in the early stages now.”

The acquisition also includes the gift of a second window. The Woodmen of the World built the chapel in 1931, as part of a tuberculosis hospital. To decorate the nondenominational Fraser Chapel, as it was then called, the organization commissioned a set of narrow, pointed lancet windows by Tiffany to represent all the states where it operated. Sunset Ridge, which purchased the property in 1959, is donating the Arkansas State Window to Crystal Bridges to accompany the Root Memorial Window.